by Jenny Brown
No wonder his wife had been convinced she was unlovable! Adam felt a strong urge to set Isabelle straight about her daughter’s beauty and charm, but thought better of it. There was no point in wrangling with her now. So he said only, “I must apologize for my rudeness during our previous encounter. Please accept my assurance that while you are under my roof you will be treated with nothing but the respect that is due to my wife’s mother.”
“It is of no import.” Isabelle waved one well-ruffled arm. “All has worked out exactly as I’d hoped.” She took a step nearer to her daughter. “Can you imagine, Zoe, my surprise when I received a letter from your husband? I was shocked. I was amazed. Such politeness, one might almost have thought him a Frenchman. What a gentleman he is to know what is due to the mother who raised his wife.”
Zoe shot him a questioning look. “You wrote to her?”
He nodded.
Zoe’s face showed the confusion he would have expected her to feel, but before she could ask him why, her mother explained, “He wished me to tell him the secret you have pestered me about all these years. About your father. But that I would tell to no one but yourself. So I am here!”
“To tell me who my father really was?” Zoe’s hopeful look was almost painful to behold. Adam hoped the truth wouldn’t come as too much of a disappointment.
“Of course.” Isabelle waved one plump wrist airily. “Did I not just say I would? That is why I came to visit you. I knew you would wish to know it, though that MacMinn! He warned me not to come. To hear him talk you would think I was committing a crime to go visit my only child, and she a new bride. ‘Lord Ramsay won’t put up with the likes of you,’ says he. ‘His Lordship will throw you out on your backside if you impose on his hospitality.’ ”
Isabelle came up for air. “He is as bad as you, Zoe, for always expecting the worst. But I told him, ‘My daughter knows what’s due to the mother who has sacrificed everything to make her what she is today. And if she’s too proud to welcome me I’ll just turn around and come back home, though how I should do such a thing, when all my money has been spent on the journey, is more than I can say. But of course, you are rich now, Zoe. The cost of a mail coach can mean nothing to you.”
Isabelle rambled on, exclaiming at the grandeur of their home, the extent of their lands, and even the handsomeness of her daughter’s new husband, but to Adam, the rest of her words might as well have been spoken in the language of the barbarous Turks, for after she had so casually dropped the name MacMinn, he could hear nothing else.
Isabelle knew MacMinn. How was that possible?
Brutally he interrupted the flow of her conversation. “This MacMinn you mentioned. Is he a tall man with a kind of hangdog air about him?”
“Of course. He has never got over the pain in his heart when I refused to marry him,” Isabelle replied airily. “But a woman like me can’t marry her coachman. Surely he should understand such a thing.”
Adam struggled to clear his mind. “MacMinn is your coachman?”
“Not now. But in the past, when I could pay.” She smiled her dazzling smile. “And now that my daughter has married so well, who is to say? Perhaps he may be again. But even when I don’t pay him, he still comes by to visit us, though he is always so tiresome, shaking his finger and telling me to mend my ways—when my ways are so useful and my daughter has never wanted for anything.”
Adam cut her off again as the implications of what she’d just said crashed in on him. “Did MacMinn tell you he saw your daughter wed?”
“Of course. When I received your letter, I thought it was some jest, some—how you say—practical joke. But MacMinn said it was true and swore on the Holy Book that he’d been there to see it done. How I scolded him for keeping such a thing secret from me, the mother, who should have been the first to know!”
Adam bit his lip, willing himself not to give in to the horrid suspicion that was growing in his mind. MacMinn might have come from the Dark Lord, just as he’d claimed. He had known the feather code. That he knew Isabelle didn’t mean that he hadn’t come from Iskeny. Isabelle had known the Dark Lord, too, or why else would she have given him control over her daughter? Perhaps MacMinn had made her acquaintance back at the time when that bargain had been struck. Perhaps the Dark Lord had sent MacMinn to visit Isabelle so he could keep an eye on his ward. Given Isabelle’s proclivities, that wouldn’t have been that surprising.
But as much as Adam wanted to believe that this was true, there was another, more obvious explanation for what had happened. And if it were true, Isabelle’s pretense that she hadn’t known about their wedding until now must be another of her lies.
He fixed Isabelle with his steeliest gaze. Pronouncing each word as if the slightest unevenness might cause it to explode, he asked, “Before MacMinn told you we were wed, when had you seen him last?”
“Oh, weeks before.” Isabelle waved her hand. “The same day that you and Zoe began your journey north. Oh, how he raged when he learned I had let my daughter go off with that terrifying Lord Ramsay!” She gave a tinkling laugh, “The names that he called me, par foi! But he was singing a different song when he told me you were wed. No longer does he fear you. Now you are the best husband my daughter could ever wish. It all turned out so well, that even he had to admit it. You are married to a lord, Zoe, and I am here, welcomed by my new son-in-law with nothing but smiles and happiness.”
Adam staggered back against the wall. There was no way to deny it. MacMinn had not come from the island. He had come from London, direct from Isabelle. And the message he’d brought—the deathbed wish that had impelled Adam to wed—the Dark Lord hadn’t sent it.
Zoe shot him a sympathetic look as she saw the impact that her mother’s casual chatter was having on him, but he couldn’t bear to meet her eyes.
It hadn’t been the Dark Lord’s will that they marry. Zoe had not been the old man’s final gift to him—or his gateway to the Final Teaching. Nor had there been some reason known only to the Dark Lord why he should forgive his sister’s murderer. Or break his vow of chastity.
He’d taken Zoe to wife at Isabelle’s behest. He’d been tricked into it—and so easily—blinded by his raging desire for her. He had so rejoiced in the message MacMinn had brought him, thinking only of having Zoe in his arms that he had ignored the subtle clues that should have revealed the fraud.
Adam turned on his heel and lunged toward the doorway, stumbling against it in his haste to leave the hall whose air seemed to have been replaced by a noxious gas that left him choking.
But the truth went with him. There was no escape. Isabelle’s minion had tricked him into marriage, made him violate his vow of chastity—that vow his teacher had never released him from. Now he could never become the Dark Lord’s heir.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. With what he’d learned over the previous weeks, Adam could have found a way to live on happily just as he was. If it weren’t for something else—the thing that threatened to turn all the happiness he had found with his wife into dust and ashes.
How could Zoe not have known?
He tried not to think of it, but his mind kept going back to the hour of his wedding. One thing stood out, now that he knew the truth. She’d recognized MacMinn. That’s why her eyes had grown so wide when she had seen him enter her chamber. It was only because Adam had been so blinded by his desire that he’d told himself she’d reacted that way because the Dark Lord’s messenger looked like such a beggar.
And later, when Zoe had refused to give her assent to the blacksmith’s question, MacMinn had given her some sign with his hands. Adam had told himself it must be more of the Dark Lord’s magic. But it was all too clear now what had really happened. It hadn’t been anyone’s magic that had compelled Zoe to take that fatal vow, just some secret signal from her mother’s coachman.
Had she only been pretending all along that it was his spell that made her wed him? Adam’s heart broke as he got his answer. She must have been—to keep him fr
om discovering MacMinn’s ruse. He should have paid more attention when his teacher said that a spell of that kind couldn’t compel its subject to do something against their will.
But if she had pretended that he’d made her wed him, and pretended, too, that painful longing to be his bride, what about her love for him—the love she never put into words, no matter how much he told her that he loved her? He’d always been so certain she must feel it. He’d excused her silence by telling himself it wasn’t her nature to be demonstrative that way.
But maybe he’d been wrong. Perhaps she had feigned it all—to make the best of the marriage she’d been trapped in by her mother’s ruse. Perhaps his joy in their love had been only one more self-delusion.
You will become a victim or a savior, his teacher had told him back when first he’d erected his nativity. But Adam had been so determined to become a savior he hadn’t considered the other possibility. Blinded by his Pisces self-deception he’d become Isabelle’s victim—two times over.
All he could do now was pray with what little faith he had left that he hadn’t been Zoe’s, too. Zoe, whose love he’d thought had rescued him.
Chapter 17
Her mother sank down on the sofa in Zoe’s dressing room, stroked the upholstery appreciatively, and yawned like an overfed cat. “You have done well for yourself, ma petite,” she said. “Whoever would have thought it?”
Zoe made no reply. It was taking all her energy not to let her irritation show. If only her mother had waited a little longer before testing Adam’s patience with a visit.
How typical that it had been his kindness that had put him into this situation. He’d known what it would mean to her to find out who her father was, and to that end had put aside his disgust for her mother. But clearly, his rudeness when face-to-face with her had taught him he’d overestimated his ability to tolerate her presence and all its inescapable associations.
Had he told Zoe what he intended before he’d written to her mother, she would have gently warned him against it, just as she’d discouraged him from taking her to London in the near future. They were so happy here. Why risk it?
If only her mother would stop talking long enough to let Zoe go find her husband, wherever he had fled, and soothe the conflicted emotions Isabelle’s arrival had provoked. But her mother was just getting started and showed no sign of slowing down. She was enjoying far too much her new role as the mother of a baroness.
That the man who had made her new status possible couldn’t stand her didn’t enter into it. Even when Adam had bolted from the reception hall, her mother had merely waved one hand and said, “Men!” in that same tone of amused exasperation one used when a puppy had disgraced itself on the carpet. Then she’d demanded that Zoe give her a tour of the manor, and after her daughter had led her through the principal rooms, she’d followed her into this, her dressing room, and after examining its furnishings as if considering their purchase, plumped down on the room’s most comfortable chair.
“Now, ma petite, comes the difficulty,” Isabelle said, raising one beautifully manicured finger in warning. “If you do not attach your husband firmly he will soon lose interest and wander to other women. There is no way to prevent it. That is the story of the wife. But now that you are no longer une vierge, I may teach you some helpful—how you say—tricks, so you may hold on to him a little longer. A wife must not be lazy, no! Not if she is to have any hope of keeping her man faithful. She must work twice as hard as a woman like myself. She has not the advantage that a mistress commands, for she cannot threaten to leave him if his attentions flag.”
Zoe bit her tongue. There was no point in starting an argument with her mother now. “I appreciate your concern, but I need no instruction in pleasing my husband.”
“So you may think, now, while still you are a bride, but in a few more weeks when the novelty of your innocence wears off? Then perhaps you will wish you had taken up my offer. I wish only the best for you, ma petite.” Her mother reached out and took Zoe’s cheek between thumb and forefinger, and pinched it in a well-remembered gesture—one she’d always hated.
“But perhaps I misunderstand,” her mother added. “Perhaps you do not wish him to be faithful. You are his wife. So even when he strays, you will always be Lady Ramsay. Perhaps there is no need to keep him captivated? That must be it! There can be little pleasure to be found in tolerating the embraces of a man so ill tempered as your husband.” She shook her head sagely, setting the golden curls to quivering. “Perhaps you will be glad when he looks elsewhere for his satisfaction?”
“No,” Zoe said, far more forcefully than she’d intended. “I’m quite happy with my husband and he with me. We need not discuss the matter.”
Her mother regarded her with a calculating look. “So, that is the problem, eh? You are above your mother now, are you, my fine Lady Ramsay? You are embarrassed that I have come to discommode your oh-so-haughty husband? If that is it, it is of no import. I shall stay this night only and walk to the village tomorrow to meet the mail coach. It was with no thought of my own pleasure that I journeyed for seven days without stop to reach you. Such is the sacrifice that a mother will make for her child. And now that I have found you well, I shall rejoice and journey seven more days to rid you of my presence.”
“Mother, stop it! You know you’re welcome in my home.”
Her mother raised one languid hand to her brow. “It is such a thankless task to raise a child. But I must be grateful that you do not throw me out into the street, for in truth I have spent my last farthing paying that robber of a peasant, and if you aren’t generous to me, the next you will hear of your poor mother is that she has been taken up for debt. I have been far too concerned about your fate these past months to waste my time finding the rent. Not when my daughter had been kidnapped by the Dark Lord!”
So that was really why she’d come. No surprise. “How much do you need?” Zoe asked.
“A mere trifle of two hundred pounds would see me clear.”
“That is more than I have at hand. I will have to speak to my husband about it.”
Her mother sighed. “I had heard this new husband of yours is very rich. Can he not spare a little for your poor mother, who has never had any thought but for your happiness? Even a hundred pounds would satisfy that vulture of a landlady for some months to come and leave me enough to buy some pretty things.”
“I will do what I can, Mama. You can rely on it.”
“I am glad you know your duty to the mother who raised you and made so many sacrifices for you.” Her parent stood and stretched again, giving a smaller yawn to indicate that, having attained her object, she considered the interview over. Zoe led her to the room she had ordered prepared for her and then fled to her own chamber.
Zoe had scarcely had time to loosen her stays and lie back on her bed, when the door from the adjoining chamber was flung open and her husband exploded into the room.
At the sight of him, her heart lifted, as it always did when he rejoined her after an absence. She sat up and opened her arms to welcome him into her embrace. But he stood, rigid, in the doorway and made no move to join her. As she took in his expression, the warmth in her heart drained away. He was even angrier now than he’d been when he had so abruptly left her alone with her mother. The compassion she’d felt for him earlier, at the thought of what he must feel when confronting all that her mother represented, flipped over into annoyance.
“Surely you can put up with my mother for a few short days,” she said, hiding her dismay behind an air of cool unconcern. “You knew whose daughter I was when you decided to wed me.”
The look her husband turned on her was almost feral. “Yes, I did know whose daughter you were when I married you. But I had forgotten how cunning she was and the lengths to which she would go to get what she wanted.”
“There’s no reason to make everything into a tragedy. All she wants now is some money with which to keep her creditors at bay. That’s nothing new. She’s always
depended on me for money when her own runs out. But there’s little cunning involved.”
Adam gazed at her with a look of stark incomprehension. Then he pounded one fist on the bed. “By God, Zoe, I can’t bear it any longer. I must know the truth. Were you in it with her all along?”
“In it with her?” she repeated. What could he be talking about? “Not at all. I had no idea she was coming to visit. It was you who sent her that letter and you’d said nothing to me about it or I would have told you not to. But I will give her some money. You’ve been more than generous with me, and I can easily spare some of my pin money to give to her.”
“That’s not what I meant.” His voice was a growl. “You recognized MacMinn at our wedding.”
“But what has that to do with anything?”
“Everything! Has this all been a charade? Were you just pretending to be under the spell?” His eyes pried into hers and then he lunged toward her, so that his lips were only inches from her own. Surely he was not going to kiss her, as angry as he was? But just as she thought their lips must meet, he pulled away from her with one swift movement that affected her like a slap.
“You must have known MacMinn came straight from London. And yet you said nothing about his being there at our wedding, and put on such a show of pretending I had tricked you into marriage.”
His words made no sense.” Of course you tricked me into marriage, but what of it? I’ve long ago forgiven you.”
But he had not forgiven her for whatever it was he now accused her of. His hands, balled into fists, pressed against the rough fabric of the homespun breeches that clad his long thighs, as if he were only barely restraining himself from using them.
“You had no need to become a governess,” he said bitterly. “Had you gone on the stage, you might have become the greatest actress of the age.”